There’s an enormous electronic billboard on the corner of Santa Monica
Boulevard and Bundy. Somewhat predictably, LA has turned stopping at the
traffic lights into an ad break: as you wait, you watch commercials for a
shiny mobile phone for $35 a month, the latest chick flick and a hybrid car
that can go from LA to San Francisco on one tank of good intentions.
Stay tuned and you’ll see Jesus – not Christ our Lord, but Rodriguez the tax
attorney – and then, as the lights turn green, a fleeting glimpse of
local-boy-done-bad Emigdio Preciado Jr, one of the FBI’s top 10 most wanted.
It’s LA life boiled down to a series of messages from its sponsors, but LA
culture is far harder to pin down.
Because Los Angeles has no centre – Dorothy Parker famously described it as
“72 suburbs in search of a city” – any visit here is essentially a trip to
the ’burbs. Universal Studios is in North Hollywood, the Getty Center is in
Brentwood and the Huntington Library is way out in San Marino. The best
hotels are in Beverly Hills, the best bars are in West Hollywood and the
beach is over in Santa Monica.
And that’s the way it’s been since the automobile and the freeway allowed
Angelenos to commute, with billionaire building contractors such as Eli
Broad selling suburban living as the quintessential architectural expression
of the American dream. The downside was that downtown became a desert, a
nightmare on Main Street, abandoned after dark to the rats and the gangs.
Such urban heart disease used to be fatal, but these days there is a cure. It
has worked – sort of – in London’s Southwark and it has given Bilbao a new
lease of life. Valencia is undergoing treatment and LA, with its
characteristic affection for medication, is already addicted. And it’s an
easy pill to swallow: you build a Tate, a Guggenheim or a City of Arts and
Sciences, and that stilled heart starts beating again.
Over the past 15 years, the city has poured a lot of money into its empty
heart. There’s the $163m (£84m) cathedral – nicknamed the Taj Mahoney after
its controversial cardinal – and Frank Gehry’s magnificent Walt Disney
Concert Hall, part of a highbrow entertainment complex that is LA’s version
of London’s South Bank.
A mile away down South Figueroa Street, beside the huge stadium of the Staples
Center, is the Nokia LA Live complex – a $4.2 billion entertainment zone
comprising a theatre, performance spaces, bars, restaurants and a 54-storey
Ritz-Carlton (to open in 2010) – touted, somewhat depressingly, as “Times
Square West.”
And that’s just the start. This summer sees the beginning of the Grand Avenue
Project, a $3 billion reworking of the city centre, pitched as “the Los
Angeles version of the Champs-Elysées”, and featuring a 16-acre park flanked
by public buildings leading down to the Daily Planet tower of City Hall.
The man behind the plan is none other than Eli Broad, the builder who made his
billions persuading Angelenos to live in the ’burbs, and the Grand Avenue
Project isn’t his only scheme to drag them back into town.
The shallowest city on earth has been pimping its artistic attractions for
years, but since that was like Burger King announcing it sold salads, nobody
paid much attention. After all, this is the city where cultural tourism
means finding Britney’s house on a map of the homes of the stars.
So when LA announced the gala opening of the Broad Contemporary Arts Museum
(BCAM) on an old car park, my expectations were matched only by my
enthusiasm. Or, as the locals say, I was, like, whatever, dude.
And then I was, like, wow, man. Forget the building: the architect Renzo
Piano’s original concept is there somewhere, buried beneath layers of
travertine and compromise (the locals are already calling it Pompidou Lite)
– but what it contains is the distilled essence of contemporary American
art.
The show starts on the third floor with a cabaret of Jeff Koons’s finest
moments. Michael Jackson and Bubbles, in all their nauseating, Franklin Mint
tackiness, recline in the shadow of an elephantine stainless-steel balloon
dog, a 6ft cracked egg and a theme-park St John the Baptist. It’s the sacred
and the plastic profane, side by side in a space that could be nowhere but
LA.
Anterooms hide Warhol and Hirst, curiously out of context in the natural light
flooding through the glass ceiling, and as you percolate downwards in the
biggest lift I have ever seen, through six galleries rammed to the rafters
with works from Rothko to Rauschenberg and Baldessari to Basquiat, it
becomes clear that this is a world-beating collection.
All but a handful belong to Broad, who’d need another dozen BCAMs to display
the full extent of his loot. Ludicrously, despite having his name above the
door, the septuagenarian builder-turned-benefactor has now decided not to
donate his hoard to the museum, lending the works on display for one year
only.
The 178 pieces by 28 of the world’s most important contemporary artists might
never be in the same place at the same time again, but that’s not the only
reason why you need to visit LA this year. In a post9/11, postcredit crunch,
postmodernist and soon-to-be postBush world, there are few cities outside of
Shanghai that are buzzing like the City of Angels.
This month, the breathtakingly beautiful Getty Villa (www.getty.edu)
relaunched its theatre lab series, offering cut-price performances of
reworked classical texts. Nothing quite overshadows the true-life drama of
its former curator, Marion True, standing trial in Italy on charges of
antiquity theft, but Oedipus Rex, reset somewhere between the State
penitentiary and the barrios of East LA, comes close, in a
Socrates-meets-the-Sopranos way. Performances of Icarus and Philoktetes run
for the rest of the season, with tickets at just $7 (£3.50).
February also saw the opening of the $18m Chinese gardens at the Huntington
Library (www.huntington.org), and
this autumn sees the launch of the Grammy Museum (www.grammymuseum.org),
charting the history of recorded music.
But, above all, you should come for the art. The New York Times has conceded
that LA is “the centre of visual art making” in America, which must have
really hurt. The Getty Center, that hilltop temple of high art, celebrates
its 10th anniversary with the installation of the Stark collection of modern
sculpture, comprising 28 pieces by the likes of Miro, Magritte, Léger and
Giacometti. And the jewel that is the Museum of Latin American Art (www.molaa.org)
has reopened after a three-year, $10m expansion.
Go visit the zeitgeist in his new LA home – and if you must see Britney’s
place while you’re there, it’s at 12094 Summit Circle, Beverly Hills 90210.
Chris Haslam travelled as a guest of Virgin Holidays (0871 222 5825, www.virginholidays.co.uk),
which has five nights at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel from £779pp,
including Virgin flights from Heathrow and car hire. Or try Kuoni (01306
747002, www.kuoni.co.uk) or Complete
North America (0845 263 7100, www.completenorthamerica.co.uk)
